


Bookends, or Six Ways 'Til Sunday

by campylobacter



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Anal Sex, Barebacking, Bisexual Male Character, Creampie, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fingerfucking, First Time, Fluff, French Kissing, Humor, Oral Sex, Romance, Semipublic Sex, Tickling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-14
Updated: 2009-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-09 14:25:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 13,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campylobacter/pseuds/campylobacter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After an unexpected guest drops by, Daniel's apartment is never the same again. (The Home Crasher Trope meets archaeo-linguistics and pirate-goddess sexual mayhem, in that point of character development after Continuum.) Only enough plot to sustain the slap-slap-kiss porn. (References established Jack/Daniel relationship.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Front Door Rattles

**Author's Note:**

> Props to my awesome beta-readers magnavox_23 and hummingfly67 for patiently putting up with my glacial prima donna writing process.
> 
>  
> 
> [10-track Fanmix for those of you who'd like 90s rock/alternative/hip-hip/indie/electronic music for each chapter](http://8tracks.com/campylobacter/bookends-fanmix)

Late one Friday night, I'm transliterating Sanskrit and underlining potential Ancient cognates in the _Rig Veda_ when the front door rattles and opens with a slam. Just as quickly, it slams shut.

I vault over the couch and draw my gun on the intruder, who'd already slumped against the door. Teal'c would've been proud it took about ten seconds, except...

"Hi, Daniel," Vala gasps between heaving breaths. Strands of dark, damp hair cling to her face; her clothing's grimy with dirt and blood. "Mind if I... stop by for a bit?"

"What the—? How did you—? Vala?" I set aside my weapon and kneel to examine her injuries.

She swats away the hand I extend toward her brow. "Soon as... catch my breath... I'll explain." She wipes sweat and gore from her face with the sleeve of her torn jacket.

"Can you stand?" I try to soothe her, lifting her to her feet. "We need to get you medical attention."

"Daniel, no," she protests while squirming out of my grasp. "It's not my blood."

Okay, that's not necessarily reassuring. I usher her into the den with a sweeping gesture. She takes a few more breaths, shuffles into the room, and falls heavily on the couch, directly on top of my book. I bring her a glass of water, which she drains in nearly one gulp after her breathing normalizes.

"You've books everywhere," she comments, pulling the book from under her. She squints at the text. "DEH-vah NAAH-gah-ree script, right?"

"Devanagari, yes." I snatch away the book. "Before we discuss the finer points of alphabetic recognition because of my brilliant tutelage, you have a version of truth to relay from which I must extrapolate a fuller version of truth." I wait with my arms crossed, hoping to prevent her from changing the subject.

Vala scowls, still managing charm despite her disarray, and looks at the ceiling. "Very well: Bored. Young Marines. Offer to go 'bar-hopping'. Chilly motorbike ride. Motorbike tavern. Abandoned in favor of young prostitutes. Ugly fat man. Horrid, inferior beer. Groping hands. Fighting. Property damage. Ugly fat man's ugly friends. Escape. Pursuit. Evasion. GPS device." She tosses a possibly stolen electronic gadget on the books piled on my coffee table.

"The melodrama in your elocutionary style undermines the concision of your plot, Vala Mal Doran." Teal'c might've given me the eyebrow for my dry imitation.

"I thank you for such unconditional hospitality, Daniel Jackson," she responds in kind. "To compound my humiliation, I must also beg cash of you to hire a conveyance back to base."

Her reckless combination of resourcefulness and vulnerability astounds me. "It's still a long hike up the mountain after a taxi lets you off at the highway gate."

"Fine then, no taxi. Which finger is it you Tau'ri use to 'hitch-hike'?" She gestures gratuitously, then pockets the locator and rises to leave.

"Ah ah ah!" I stay her departure by gripping her shoulders. "That's just asking for more trouble."

She holds out her palm. "Cash?"

"Soap. Go wash up." I turn her in the direction of the bathroom. "Unless you'd rather wake Sam or call Colonel Mitchell to drive you back at two-thirty in the morning, you can use the couch tonight and return to base tomorrow after I get my truck from the repair shop."

"Hmm... this evening's turning out better than it began." Her voice does that sultry... thing, and she looks over her shoulder with heavy eyelids while leaning back into my arms with a slow, unambiguous shimmy that goes straight to my cock.

Jackson, ya fell right into that one. And just your luck, while wearing sweatpants.

I push her away and walk into my bedroom, which I have no intention whatsoever of her ever, ever seeing. Whatsoever. "I might have some clean walk-of-shame clothing for you to borrow if bar muck and blood kill your buzz," I call back to her.

"Is clothing really mandatory?" I hear her unzipping an article of clothing right there in the hallway.

I preempt her disrobing by hurling a towel at her, followed by a spare t-shirt and, um, sweatpants.

While she showers, I secure my gun and check the front door for damage. A wide streak of stubborn, smeared grime mars the interior surface; it takes more environmentally friendly cleaning solution to remove than I'd estimated. A makeshift pick crafted from a wire cork cage protrudes from the exterior lock. While performing a meticulous extraction, I thank circumstance that my truck isn't here for her to hot-wire. As an extra precaution, I walk the perimeter of the apartment building.

When I return, the rush of water from the shower is silent, and the bathroom light's off.

I find Vala on my bed, lying on her belly, bare feet in the air, perusing Noam Chomsky's _Syntactic Structures_. She looks up as I approach. "Walls of books, books in your bathroom, books on your nightstand, books on your bed, books on top of books. Your home's a veritable library of congress."

"CON-gress," I clarify, emphasizing the first syllable instead of the last. "And, and... couch!" I point the direction with maybe more vehemence than necessary.

She makes a moue, tosses back her wet hair, grabs the book and slithers off the bed. She takes two steps — "Oof!" — and falls to the floor in mid-flounce.

"Hey, careful." I pick up my Chomsky. "That's a first edition."

Vala stands, letting the borrowed pants drop to her ankles. "How do you expect me to walk in these? They're too loose and far too long."

I am neither looking at her bare legs nor the way my t-shirt barely covers other parts, and rummage through my dresser for an old pair of running shorts.

She's already exited and is in the den, long legs stretched on tiptoe, raiding my bookshelves. "You must have pornography around here somewhere."

I throw the shorts at her. "Don't even think about disturbing me until I've had my morning coffee. I'll be sleeping with my gun." I return to my room.

"Don't fire it too soon, darling."

I slam the door. If I ignore her, not getting the last word doesn't matter.

Wait, shit.

The book I was reading is still out there. Okay. There are several hundred more in this room, some of which I haven't re-read.

It's about an hour later when I wake, having dozed to the reliably soporific chapter on apophatic formal doctrine from the tedious Gibson translation of Husserl's _Ideen_ (the original German would've kept me awake) when the scent of unfiltered tobacco stings my nose.

I leave my eyeglasses and stumble back into the den to discover Vala and my elderly next-door neighbor sharing an obscenely thick cigar while they're playing cards around the coffee table — without having cleared off my books.


	2. You're Trashing My Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel reconsiders his offer to allow Vala to stay on his couch for the night.

"Oh hello, hon! Join me and your precious bride in a hand of pinochle." My neighbor heaves a phlegmy cough and farts — simultaneously.

"Um, h-hi, Mrs..." I notice that some of my artifacts and the tchotchke Jack gave me are being used as game winnings.

"Darling, please fetch your delightful neighbor another beer." Vala waves airily toward the kitchen. "The rest should be cold by now."

"I, the— do you mean the six bottles of _Weihenstephaner Korbinian_ that General Hammond" (requiescat in pacem) "gave me?" Okay, four bottles now.

"Why? It's certainly fit for consumption."

"I was saving— never mind. Are you using a _Scientific American_ as an ashtray?"

"Should we have used _Linguistic Atlas of England_ instead?"

"Ooh, I love pretzels," my neighbor says to no one in particular.

"Ah, Mrs. Cartman, would you please excuse us for a minute?" I give Vala a pointed glare and tilt my chin toward the kitchen. Vala sighs, coughs, and hands the cigar to my neighbor.

"Vala," I whisper, controlling my anger as we stand in the kitchen, "she's on anti-dementia and Alzheimer's medication and can't have alcohol let alone stay up this late and you're trashing my place and don't you remember what I said about disturbing me?"

Vala cocks her head, trying to look contrite, then leans close to say in those damned soft, smoky tones, "Of course. So I knocked on her door to borrow a blanket because the couch is rather cold without you in it."

I lean away, ostensibly from her beer-and-tobacco-scented breath, but also from the proximity that causes the beginnings of an inappropriate hard-on. "You are so sleeping on the back balcony now. Help me get her back to her apartment without waking the rest of the building."

The unfortunate woman is snoring on _The Royal Hordes_ when we re-enter the den, and the unextinguished cigar has nearly burnt a hole through my magazine to the book beneath it.

"It was disappointingly non-hallucinogenic," sighs Vala, crushing out the cigar.

"I haven't even read that issue." Whatever. Sam says I'm wasting money on the subscription.

We lift my neighbor to a position where we can drag her with the least amount of noise and harm to her unit.

"Oh look — it's locked." Gee, shock! And of course it's while I'm awkwardly supporting the woman's fustily humid underarm with my shoulder while trying her door.

"Pocket," whispers Vala, counterbalancing the weight and nodding to a floppy patch on the neighbor's stained housedress.

I close my eyes as I insinuate my hand into the pocket, and wince; my fingers have brushed against a slimy tissue.

"Oh look — here they are," Vala echoes in mock astonishment, jangling keys from her elegant fingers. I seize them and open the door to the dumbfounded face of my neighbor's middle-aged son.

"Help us get your mom inside," I tell him.

"So," Vala says as we settle the woman in greasy, stale-smelling sheets stuck to a sleeper sofa that likely never serves as a sofa, "is it the custom of your culture to live off the government stipend of one's aged parent in order to shirk earning a living, with no oversight if said parent's health and well-being suffer from neglect?"

"That's an uninformed, morally selective viewpoint," sniffs the son. "Besides, I collect Disability."

"For what? Gluttony and sloth?"

"Vala." I use my "we are leaving now" tone.

She shrugs and leads the way out. I'm not, not looking at the insolent twist in her hips as she strides back into my apartment.

"Vala, all this is too childish — even for you." In the den, I wave at her and the mess she's made of my home. Broken pretzels crunch underfoot. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Vala opens her mouth, a denial clearly on the tip of her tongue, then shuts it in defeat as she reads the anger on my face. She inhales, looks away, and says "Apparently, claiming I'm bored isn't an excuse."

"Bored as in 'Jack O'Neill at an extraction ceremony' bored? Or bored as in 'lonely' or 'horny'? Because everyone knows you mean either one. What I don't get is your lack of candor on the subject."

"'Lack of candor'?" She imitates Jack's tone too precisely, and frowns, incredulous. "Do you really wish me to be more explicit?"

"I wish that, that... you'd act like an adult and practice self-discipline and respect the personal space of others."

"Similar to the way you respect the personal space of others so very, very much that you hurt anyone who happens near your own personal space?"

I'm not gonna let her go Jack on me. "Vala, what gives you the right to intrude?"

She scoffs and closes her eyes in what looks like disbelief. "For someone of abnormally high intelligence, you have the thickest skull of any man I know. Haven't I earned the right?" She closes the gap between us by inches and continues in hushed tones; something in her voice breaks. "How many times must I renounce my old habits and join your quest even though I'm set on fire, raped, impregnated, abducted, tortured — or stand between you and a fatal staff blast, leave Tomin, reside in the sunless bowels of a mountain, and endure an interminable sequence of your rejections?"

I can't not look at her, but I brace myself against the way her eyes brighten with tears. "Is this where you break down and cry, I comfort you, have sex with you out of pity, then declare my undying devotion?" And then die, like in some Nicholas Sparks novel. "Because pity's not erotic."

"Pity? How dare—" She takes a deep breath and blinks away evidence of raw emotion. "Why are you martyring me to your perverse celibacy? Why not simply end this game?"

"I refuse to play your games, Vala." I win. I cross my arms and allow myself a smug smile that should put her in place.

"But it's ever so much fun, Daniel," she says with artificial cheer, and pantomimes talking hand puppets: "'Can we have a romantic relationship?' 'No!' 'Okay.' Game over." Then she hauls back and punches me in the face. Um, hard.

"OW! Gaah! What the fuck is wrong with you?!"

"We may as well end this the way it started. You like books. Think of it as a bookend." She aims a left hook at my midsection, but I block it and smack her jaw with my palm, pushing her against the wall and kicking her knees from under her as she collapses beneath me. A cascade of books falls around us, loosed from their shelves by the force of her impact.

She howls in surprised rage and wraps her hands around my neck; her fingers are unexpectedly hot. I grasp her wrists and jerk them away with a brute strength that leaves her gasping in pain. I fall on top of her, pinning her down with my weight, not letting go of her wrists.

"I'm gonna regret this, and I don't care." I cover her mouth with mine.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, it's Eric Cartman and his mom, Liane Cartman, from South Park.


	3. A Point of Resistance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel does something he might regret.

Arching against me, she moans and meets my intruding tongue with her own. This moment, Vala tastes dirty and dangerous, of ash and alcohol, sweet with the savor of sin. She writhes beneath me, sliding against the sharp corners of books, and wraps a leg around my waist.

I raise her arms above her head and use one of my hands to keep her pinioned. My other hand slides under the borrowed t-shirt, grazing taut skin and heaving ribcage, into the crease where a warm, full breast swells. I deepen the kiss and retrace the movement of my hand downward, pulling down the waist of the borrowed shorts, around and off the silken globes of her backside, not surprised by her lack of underwear.

She moans in a falling tone as I withdraw my hand to loosen the drawstring of my sweatpants, to yank them down far enough to press my growing erection against her.

I break the kiss. "Turn around and get on your knees." When our eyes meet, I see hers darkened with desire and defiance. She twists her upper body, straining at the hand I use to hold her captive, but lets me use my free hand to grasp her hip and turn her around.

I reach between her thighs and grab her crotch, slick with sweat and arousal, then push her forward and upward until she's on her knees. And then I release her hands so she can balance on all fours. Grabbing her hips, I steady her squirming movements as I rub myself into her folds.

"I'm going to take you, Vala," I whisper, leaning into her ear, in a Jack tone I know she's never heard, "the way I should've taken you on the _Prometheus_." Doing it for all the reluctant hard-ons she's caused, all the sensory-overload insomnia, all the erotic dreams, all the shame-faced solo acts.

"You said pity's not erotic," she rasps, pressing herself against me.

I lean back. "Well, I haven't made you cry. Yet."

"Hurry."

I push the shirt up her back, up to her neck, taking in the sight of smooth, flawless skin. With my fingertip, I trace the line of her backbone to where it ends in the dimples above her ass, then fondle a warm, lean haunch. She arches and whimpers in anticipation; my dick twitches, responding to the auditory stimulus. I grip her hipbones and lunge into her cunt with as much force as I can leverage.

She grunts as I penetrate her part-way, and cries out when I'm stopped at a point of resistance. She collapses her elbows, falls to her shoulders, allowing a more acute angle for entry, and I sink in the rest of the way. The sensation's so overwhelming, the only coherent thought I can form is one of duty.

This isn't how I'd planned my night; I was to have collated enough consecutive, indeclinable Ancient/Sanskrit cognate adverbs in a Vedic text to identify a cipher regarding ethereal and corporeal union. However, the applied theory's proving far more—

"Daniel!" So impatient.

I pull out, just nearly, eliciting from her a disappointed mew, then slam back in, rewarded by a loud, perfectly voiced plosive. She's impossibly tight strong wet willing hot; my dick's overheated from being inside her for only two strokes.

I begin thrusting slowly, concentrating on the corrugated texture inside her, transfixed by the look of rapture in her profile as the side of her face is smashed against the dust jacket of Carl Sagan's _Cosmos_.

She matches my thrusts precisely, regardless of irregularities in my rhythm. I don't even want to know how she acquired the skill. Sharp, sweet stabs of pleasure shoot up my spine at every stroke. I slide a hand from her hip to the exquisite curve of her waist, fingers brushing against the firm flesh of her belly, grazing erect nipples. Each of my movements she matches with a phoneme from an alphabet of vowels defying conformity to any language system but the one I'm creating with her.

I near my bursting point and slow the pace, quieting the phonic poem we compose through our bodies. Vala, missing the friction, clamps herself around me, forcing me to a violent urgency which I express in a renewed assault of thrusts.

And now we're both voicing a loud, primal poem of iambic dimeter and assonant rhyme, that angry neighbor pounding on the wall for quiet, the books beneath us shifting in tectonic confusion, Vala's hand blindly clawing Velikovsky's _Worlds in Collision_, my own heart beating faster than my hips can thrust, and Vala breaking meter with a strong, unmistakable, animal groan as she comes with a force that draws me along a minute later while everything goes silent and deafening and numb and synesthetic and full of the power of exploding inside her.

We remain locked together for long, long minutes, suspending time with the visceral echoes ricocheting between our bodies, striving to prolong a culmination I hadn't expected to be so momentous in its brevity. When our pulses slow and we draw breath in longer gasps, I wrap my arms around her, fall against her back, murmur apologies and her name into her hair, keeping myself inside her for fear of seeming too casual.

Vala shifts and turns toward me anyway; the wet spot will fall either on a mail order catalog or on a Von Däniken paperback, neither of which I intend to keep.

"Is this where you turn away, refuse to look at me, tell me that it was all a mistake, and to act like it never happened?" she asks. Her face, bare of cosmetics, glossed with perspiration, looks more innocent than I can ever remember seeing. The wide, fragile gaze she fixes on me belies the steel color of her eyes.

"Vala." A ruin in a whisper. I don't know, maybe it was a mistake, this is all so sudden, I should've used a condom, a dozen hackneyed phrases... "You're kinda messy." I move my hand to the fine, seamless sweep of her jawline and pull her face to mine. No breath stirs the space between us; we touch lips, then lose ourselves in a kiss of raw, yearning need. I gather her nearer, clasping her closer than is prudent, feeling her heart beat against mine, keeping time with fleeting time.

She pulls back a short eternity later, inhaling the air she'd given me. "Daniel, if this is the last time you ever kiss me, ever touch me, ever hold me, I want to remember it forever."

"I'll remember it regardless," I reply, and pull her mouth to mine for another kiss.


	4. Two Doorposts Beneath a Lintel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel and Vala, the morning after.

I had promised the mechanic that I'd pick up the truck before noon, but the warm, wonderful, unwise whatsoever of waking wrapped around Vala delays any sense of duty in an early Saturday sunrise.

The gentle rise and fall of her breathing soothes the impulse to mount her in haste; I slowly, carefully disengage the hand nestled in her cleavage. On the creamy canvas of her bare back, I trace the first letter of the Devanagari alphabet with my fingertip.

The first stroke resembles a "3", the shape of a woman's breasts or buttocks sideways. The next stroke begins near the cleft and curves upwards, then descends into a perfect vertical bar. The last stroke, a horizontal bar, balances midway atop the previous stroke.

"_Ah_," I breathe lightly against her nape.

"Hmm..." Vala sleepily stretches her legs under the bedcovers.

The next letter builds on the first, and I need only scribe a new parallel vertical bar beneath the horizontal stroke, much like two doorposts beneath a lintel. Just now do I fully realize, even after first suspiciously noting it on the Prometheus, that Qetesh had violated Vala through her mouth — not her neck — to appease vanity with scarless skin.

"_Aah_." I elongate the vowel, a belated solace in her ear.

"Mmm..." She voices my favorite labial consonant, but not the vowel I've written.

When I skip ahead to the penultimate vowel, it's identical to the second, but for a diacritical stroke pointing to the lintel, like a feather, which causes Vala to shiver when I flick my finger on the perfect alabaster of her side.

"Oh!" she squeaks.

"_O_, yes. You learn fast."

"What are you doing, Daniel?"

I trace a jagged backslash with two opposite tines: the Ancient letter for o, its similarity to the Hebrew _aleph_ and the Sanskrit _svastika_ not a matter of chance, as far as I'm concerned.

"Deciphering a few glyphs." _Satyān nāsti paro dharmah. In principio erat verbum. Om._ Origin. _Verimas_. Truth written on the back of the survivor of a false goddess and sanctimonious fire.

"For goodness sake, Daniel, are archaeo-linguistics and foreplay the same thing to you?" Vala rolls over, replacing the view of her Rodinesque back with Rodinesque breasts and a Hellenistic face whose lips I kiss, morning breath be damned.

I suck on her rosy, full lower lip, letting her lick my upper lip in a sloppy duel before our tongues meet and entwine. I curl my tongue into the place behind her front teeth, where she forms her dental consonants, then against the roof of her mouth for the retroflex and palatals, seeking the clues to why the sound of her throaty voice, her crisp enunciations, have me jonesing to hear her speak even when she should shut up.

She's now fully awake, and lightly scrapes her fingernails down the back of my arm; my turn to shiver. "I must say," she purrs, "your hospitality's improved overnight."

"I'm... still considering chaining you outside on the balcony."

She perks up. "Chains?"

It's her surprised grin that makes me notice I'm smiling, too. "Why do I get the feeling this is all part of some evil plan to destroy me?"

"Because, Daniel, from the moment I tied you up, it has been all part of my diabolical plan to Infiltrate SG-1 and Seduce Their Archaeologist before I slip away to shag the next heroically noble nicely-muscled twice-Ascended insane polyglot genius historian who makes me feel all melty and marvelous every time he smiles."

Well, um, once it's put that way, the insecurity seems as ludicrous as the flattery. "Mitchell would find a few faults with your plan."

"Cameron would congratulate me on my faultless execution." Her grin turns into a slack, goofy expression. She lowers her voice and drawls slowly: "So Jackson's finally dialed yer 'Gate an' entered yer event horizon? Way! Now everyone on the team's had sex with each other."

A guffaw escapes me before I can comment on the unsuccessful accent.

She pokes me in the ribs, and I parry with fingers under her arms; we roll around tickling each other until the sheets tangle our legs and we fall off the bed.

Nude, spilled and sprawled, lit by young sunlight, she's the living sex doll you dreamed about when you were fifteen; everything looks so good, you don't know where to look. But a bolt of alarm hits me as I notice a large, brilliant patch of several colors marring the skin high on her right haunch. "Vala, what's this? Did I hurt you?" How could I have missed that?

She reaches a hand to the area I brush with tentative fingertips, and flinches as she rubs the bruise. "Oh, that," she chuckles. "Ugly Fat Man got the drop on me momentarily, but I curled up just before he could stamp me in the gut."

"It's the size of a boot heel." A hematoma that large hurts and, thanks to SG-1, I know from _hematomata_. Wait, ablative: _hematomatis_.

"No worries; I made him eat a face-full of _my_ boot heel."

"What kind of asshole stomps on someone while she's on the ground?" Aiming for serious soft tissue trauma.

"The kind who gets a bloody nose and a broken motorbike."

"I see no more unchaperoned biker bar-hopping in your future." I pick her up and seat her on the bed. "I'm serious. This is my serious face."

"Ooh, he rogers her on a pile of books on the floor, carries her to his bedchamber, and now he wants to make sure she behaves properly." She pulls me astride and grabs for my goods. "Chaperone me."

I maneuver the goods away, steal a short, wet kiss, and touch my forehead to hers. "Seriously serious face, Vala."

After an eyeroll and a few more wriggles, she settles, still and quiet.

"Is... is there any chance I might've gotten you pregnant?"

Time expands into a crystalline bubble that radiates from us and bears to its interior the morning chorus of birdsong outside my window. Emotions — some that I recognize — play across her face. A remote tendril of another time, of an unknown reality beyond memory, twines through the static of everyday thought, pulls me toward the center of the bubble, until once again I'm in the here and now with Vala.

Finally, she answers. "No."

I exhale, but I don't know if it's from relief.

"I'm wearing a _Yuxien_ cap. It neutralizes male gametes, venereal pathogens, subspace interference..."

"Cap?" I look at the top of her head, at the dark cascade of strangely appealing, fuck-tousled hair. Yoo-shh-EN... Xia Dynasty...? System Lord Yu?

"Silly, it's inside." She smiles and tweaks my nose with her knuckles. "Shall I take it out and show you? It's rather pretty, custom-lathed by a silicate sculpt—"

"N-n-no! 'S okay. I'm good." I grasp her head and suck her long, pale swan's neck.

She launches into a nearly breathless yarn on how she traded used tungsten collider targets for that alien birth control device, while I concentrate on one spot just below her ear that tastes like butter and metal—

"Daniel, you bastard! You'll leave a mark!" She twists away from my lips and bats at me.

"Oh, that." I admire the hickey. "Guess you'll have to stop yammering and do something else with your mouth."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sanskrit: "Religion is not higher than truth."
> 
> Latin: "In the beginning was the word." Bibila Sacra Vulgata Ioannes 1:1


	5. How She Wears My Name

Vala narrows her eyes and crosses her arms under her breasts. In the split second that I'm distracted by the way they're hoisted higher, she swoops in and licks my stubbled chin up to my ear in one long, raunchy motion, ending with the ear getting thoroughly wet and tongue-fucked. I fall back on the bed. My resulting ramrod condition demands that I nail her to the bed with hard, relentless pounding as soon as I can get on top.

She trails her hot, open mouth down my neck, my collarbone, shoulder, armpit—

"Guh— Vala!" She's slobbering, nuzzling, lapping, giving my underarm a blowjob.

"Your scent drives me mad," she rasps. "On Dakara, you hadn't showered or smeared on that synthetic _Tau'ri_ deodorant for three days. It took every ounce of restraint I had to not rip off your damned BDUs." She straddles me, grinds herself near where I want it most, kneads my chest while licking her lips. 

Just as I open my mouth to ask, she's poleaxed herself on me, and stiffens in shock.

"Ah... Daniel!" She whimpers, shudders, eyelids fluttering as a sudden orgasm penetrates her by surprise. "That's never... oh..."

I'm not that huge, but I'm not small, either. The goosebumps texturing her skin attest to the electric vibrations jolting through her body, arcing over to the part of me inside her. She keeps repeating my name. If I close my eyes, I won't come, won't see how she wears my name on her body in Braille. All I can read now, with hands only on the points of her breasts, is "a", _aleph, ah, alif_...

Inevitably, she collapses on top of me; I use the opportunity to roll us so I'm on top, careful to stay within her.

"You say my name like it's an automatic response," I whisper in her ear.

She can hardly speak through panting. "I practice... a lot."

"When you're 'bored'?"

"Get bored... easily."

She's the least boring person I know. Her face is redolent with my musk, and my tongue collects the scattered words in her mouth to assemble them into a need I can interpret: the need to taste more of her. Her hands, usually active, curious, teasing, are as limp as the rest of her gasping, shocked body; she offers neither guidance nor resistance as I taste her chin, neck, breasts. Taking further advantage of the opportunity, I grab my eyeglasses from the nightstand; the soft-focus sylph beneath me sharpens into a corporeal consort. Spectacular doesn't begin to describe her breasts.

_Shenei shadayikh kishnei ofarim  
Teomei tzeviyah haroim bashoshanim_

Living, warm, finest doe-suede nestled in the petal-soft expanse of her chest, trembling like newborns with each heartbeat — I finally begin to cognize the full scope of a song from antiquity, whose mystery I encountered through Sarah, whose music from Sha're, whose meaning from Vala—

"What language is that?" Her hands — restless again — are upon my head, in my hair, tracing the temple pieces of my glasses.

"_Ean tais glossais ton anthropon lalo kai ton angelo_n; if I speak in the tongues of men and angels..." They would witness my confession that the forbidden fruits that have tormented me for years, those twin hemispheres roundly nested in an unceasing parade of untouchable necklines are now fully under my hands and mouth, enjoying a portion of the torture they inflicted.

"If you're quoting scripture to my tits, Daniel, that might be considered sacrilege."

"Time it became sacrament." The tongue I flick over her nipple makes her arch her back so suddenly, I almost lose my hold on the other breast. "You're really hair-trigger."

"You've no idea. Waited years."

I rock into her, the place where we're joined flooded with her slickness and generating more heat and I look down at the breasts rocking when I rock and her watching me watch her and I want to fuck her tits and her mouth and her cunt and I'm getting too close—

Phone rings.

Fuck the phone.

Fuck Vala. She's so tight. Rock 'n' roll. In and out. The tightness at the base of my spine builds again—

Second ring. Machine'll pick up on the third.

She's lying like a black-haired demon-angel on my pillow, swollen lips parted to supplicate me to ride her rough from heaven to hell, eyes begging me to not look at the phone—

Ring. Click. Machine in the den takes over, I take Vala, rock her hard, make her cry for more and I give it to her because I want to give her everything I have, everything I own—

"Jackson!" The voice from the machine, distorted by distance, urgency, and cheap electronics, won't be ignored. "Dang it Jackson answer the goshdarned phone Vala's missing and your motherlovin' cell's turned off—"

"Oh no." Vala freezes. So do I.

Then I grab for the phone on the nightstand. "Uh, Ca— Mitchell. H-hey. Vala's, um..." I'm breathing too hard to sound sane.

Vala snatches the phone. "My dear Colonel, how are you this morning?" Heavy breathing and her husky voice produce pure phone sex. "...absolutely not... a bureaucratic error... could've been anybody... I've been with Daniel the whole time..." She frowns, then hands the phone back to me.

"Jackson. You tappin' that?"

"I— what?" Vala's hip rolling is not helping me focus.

"The wife needs an alibi. Security reports her failure to check in by 0600 this morning. Might coincide with last night's police blotter. A woman matching Vala's description and a bar brawl—"

"W-wife?" Her hands stroking my ass are definitely not helpful.

"Jackson..." I can hear Mitchell pinching the bridge of his nose, hear the implied threat to summon her in to fill out an incident report.

"Um, yeah. Okay. I'm in the middle of tappin' that." 

"Whoa! TMI!" His voice then seems to direct away from the mouthpiece. "_Odyssey_, stand down on that beaming order."

I hang up before I can articulate a death threat.

"Why didn't you invite him over for a threesome?"

I knock the receiver off the hook and then knock the phone off the nightstand. "I let you lie here and lay on a big lie while lying low and getting laid. What am I gonna do with you?"

"If you're on top, Daniel, you'd better be prepared to pound me into the next galaxy."

"Galaxy nuthin. Gonna drill you into an alternate reality."

The look of unalloyed delight on her face should've warned me, because I lean in for a kiss and instead get my tongue sucked out of my mouth, my hair pulled, and the skin on my back jabbed by a handful of insistent fingernails. She sets the pace by grinding her pelvis into mine. After a minute of fucking my mouth in time with her hips, she lets me wrench free to get air back into my lungs.

"Vala, who's on top?" The way she's bucking restores the momentum I'd lost while Mitchell was messing with me.

"You tell me." She's not so much getting laid as she is getting off — and getting me off, too, which feels so tight and sweet it burns a swath of bliss from my dick to my brain; I'm harder than ever and shove myself in with all the force I've got. And she still wants more, wants it faster, wants it deeper, wraps those long, satiny legs around my waist, lets me lift her by the small of her back to lodge myself balls-deep inside her. Might as well be teenagers blasting a heavy metal anthem on the stereo for all the noise we're making with the headboard drumming the wall and her refrain of groans against my verse of grunts. I can't last a few more beats if we don't slow the hell down—

Our end of the bed crashes to the floor as the frame splinters off the rails; we lurch wall-ward; the headboard pitches dangerously over us but is checked by a sacrificial lamp, which teeters on the nightstand, succumbs to gravity, and joins the phone on the floor. My glasses are still on my face, in ironic witness to the destruction they avoided.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hebrew: Thy two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a gazelle, which feed among the lilies. Shir-Hashirim 4:4
> 
> Greek: from Pros Korinthious A 13:1


	6. The Precarious Bed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel has a way with words, but Vala's a woman of action.

"Oh, the downstairs neighbors are gonna love that." I let my forehead drop between her breasts.

"Told ya the couch was better."

We gingerly extract ourselves from each other and the precarious bed, but not before the sound of insistent knocking and doorbell ringing begins. I take my time pulling on boxers over an excruciating boner.

"You're not letting this turn of events cancel the festivities, are you?" She lounges on the floor, like a wanton in a Goya painting, as if she belongs there.

"If we rent a hotel room, you'd trash that, too."

"Hey, I'm not the only one here who ruts like a wild beast..." she calls after me as I walk down the hallway.

I hide my lower body behind the front door as I unlock it to the Prozac-addicted trophy wife from Down Below; the reek of overpriced perfume, hairspray and Hennessey invades my foyer.

"This is the last straw," she grates through her lipstick-smeared teeth. "I'm sick and tired of you disgusting faggots pounding ass when I'm trying to sl—"

The sight of Vala — grinning widely, without a stitch of clothing — leaning on the wall next to me, silences her tirade. Vala winks at her as I close the door.

"Did she just call us a bundle of sticks?"

"It's... pejorative slang for male homosexuals." I continue past her look of bewilderment. "Firewood."

Agape, she tries to find words. "Wha— But... they burn people here, too, for being different?" I watch the hurt in her face harden, fend off the memory of Ver Ager.

"We're past that, I hope." I trace the frown lines between her brows. "Not sure of its exact etymology."

Her expression smoothes, then changes into a smile. "Now those cryptic text messages on your mobile from General O'Neill make sense."

I feel a headache coming on as the tension in my body leaves my groin and travels upward. "Speaking of my cell phone... I don't recall turning it off to charge it last night."

She cringes. "It might not have, ah... remained plugged in."

“Dammit, Vala. I knew I’d regret this.” For a fraction of a second, her smile falters, so I try to continue in a more casual vein. “Look, I’m having coffee. You want some breakfast?”

"I, I need to freshen up,” she says, heading for the bathroom. “I'll eat after."

Which she does. I'm standing on the balcony and sipping coffee, surveying the view of suburban sprawl when she joins me, shamelessly nude, pulls down my boxers and licks my balls.

"Muh— _ma, che minchia_!" I almost miss finding a flat surface to set down the mug.

She could be a graduate of the Jack O'Neill School of Giving Head or, more likely, professor emeritus, because she doesn't use her hands, and starts by lapping me everywhere except the point aching for it. The post-grad bonus is the feel of those amazing tits rubbing my thighs. I almost suggest we take this somewhere more private, but she's so set on getting acquainted with my crotch that it would seem rude. If she tastes herself on me, she must be enjoying it for all the moaning — or maybe it's my moaning...

She's done with the foreplay and the head of my dick gets that red hot mouth, lips pulling up the foreskin, tongue swirling between it and the tip, then the slow, steady sliding up and down the shaft, the tongue a lush, slick underside sensation enjoyed for almost a minute until _ya wan ya daru_ her hand gripping my ass _macht euch bereit_ the neighbors'll really hate me now vengo a casa everything interrupted bursts out in a paratactic, righteous rush _sha-sheh atayu_ fireflies behind my eyelids _resorberet_ she's a swallower.

I've been leaning against the rail— no, now it's the building. She stands, gliding her body up the length of mine, and kisses me. Through the lingering flavor of my Mandheling roast I taste what she didn't swallow, and she makes me suck her mouth until it's gone.

"Um, wow." My glasses are crooked. Everything looks weirdly dreamlike and feels dreamily weird. "I owe you one."

"You owe me much more, Daniel, but I'm fine for the moment." Vala grins and inserts two fingers in my mouth — two wet fingers that taste like she brought herself off while blowing my brains. Not a dream, and not a dream I wanna wake from.

I reach for the mug. My coffee's still hot.

On the guest bathroom floor, a wad of pink elastic string that passes for panties catches between my toes. A crumpled heap of leather and nondescript fatigues drape over a pair of boots in a chaotic still life, portending a change I can't quite comprehend.

"Vala, you're more than welcome to use my washer and dryer for these." I scoop up the pile, vaguely disturbed by the domestic blandness of the offer. She's in the kitchen, breakfasting on a banana.

"You can launder leather?" The banana gets a slow motion porno treatment.

"Um... well, no, but the other clothes should come..." (damn banana) "clean just fine."

For some reason, I find myself doing her laundry.

While Vala attempts to set the bed aright, I shower and shave, a routine that suddenly seems not as routine as the thousands of times I'd done it before. Any moment, I expect her to take advantage of the opportunity to play around in the water — I'd even left the door unlocked — but I'm oddly uninterrupted.

I finish and wrap a towel around my waist, then peek into the room. The bed frame leans against my dresser, apparently irreparable without advanced carpentry tools, and Vala's not there.

In the den, I replace a few of the books spilled last night, pausing to consider whether to keep _Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, Part 2_ by E. A. Wallis Budge. It feels lonely, like an old man in a rest home, valued in his day, now forgotten for being obsolete. Through the near wall, I hear the muffled sound of my next door neighbor's son yelling at her as I return the book to its usual spot.

Vala's sitting outside on a balcony chair, wrapped in one of the down comforters I use in winter, sipping from a steaming German beer stein incongruously dangling a Japanese tea tag. I watch her through the glass. Propped on her knees is the battered, water-warped book that was my constant companion during a fall semester as a wide-eyed undergrad: _The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light_ by William Irwin Thompson. More passages are underlined, highlighted, or annotated than are unmarked, and Vala's squinting, trying to make sense of my handwriting. She keeps flipping back to the first page of the prologue, "The Time Light Bodies Took to Fall", and my facile diagram of the mythic cosmos as perceived by a sophomore. On the opposite page, one of my unspeakable attempts at poetry, where I clumsily rhymed "mythopoeic" with "noetic", attests to the correct decision to abandon a major in English. If I interrupt her, maybe she won't notice the couplet pairing "ontology" with "philology".

I clear my throat.

She looks up, startled, and quickly hides the book inside the comforter with her. "Oh. H-hi. It's such a beautiful morning out here."

"I'd never have guessed you were a closet folklorist." I walk out to join her.

"With a subtitle such as 'Mythology, Sexuality &amp; the Origins of Culture', how could I resist?"

"Since when did you become interested in my library?"

"You don't write in the books at your office."

"Well, mainly because most of those books are classified, or government property, or not from..." I wave a finger to indicate the entire planet. "Here."

"I'd always thought you'd merely read them, not had a dialogue with them."

"Books and I have a long history..." I think I can see her bare shoulders shivering in the crisp morning air. "Don't you wanna come inside and take a warm shower?"

She shakes her head, tucks her lips inside her mouth.

"Why not?"

"I— because..." She falls silent, turns her back to me.

"If something's wrong, please tell me."

Her shoulders lift as she takes a deep breath. "You're taking me back to the mountain. Along the way, you'll tell me you regret what's happened." Her voice drops, and I strain to hear the rest of what she says. "You'll ask me to pretend that none of this ever meant anything. I— I can't wash you off as easily, Daniel."

What the—? "Vala, you think I'm messing with you?" I put my hands on her shoulders; I can feel her shaking.

She shrugs me off. "I don't know what or why or when with you. All I know is what you do, because what you say — whether with all the words in your mouth or printed in your books or carved on ruins — contradicts how you truly feel or what you'll actually do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Italiano: (loosely) "What the fuck?"  
> Goa'uld/Abydonian: "Behold (thy god), kneel (before thy god)."  
> Deutsch: "Make ready the feast."  
> Espanol: "I'm coming home."  
> Abydonian: "The sandstorm approaches."  
> Latin: "She swallows."


	7. Something Simple

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Soundtrack: "Hold Me Up" by Live, just like that scene from "Zack &amp; Miri Make a Porno"

"Oh, okay... so I'm not allowed irony or sarcasm or mockery or innuendo or deception, but— but you are?"

She turns to face me, her expression composed, contained. "It's not about wordplay or even bed-sport. It's about knowing what's right, and taking right action, which you have no problem doing when the galaxy's in peril, but balk at when you're faced with something simple — something personal — which doesn't happen every day, or even twice in a lifetime."

The brittle resolve in her face, poised to harden or shatter according to whether I reject or accept her, must be reflecting something in my own.

"Vala, I'm sorry. I… I regret what I said about regretting this." What happened to my vocabulary? If I can't tell her, I'll have to show her. I reach down, pull her out of her cocoon — she hasn’t bothered to clothe herself — and lift her to her feet. "Come inside with me."

"Daniel—" I see a protest die on her lips, fighting against the hope that she's wrong about my intentions.

I replace her utterance with my own lips; the firm set to her mouth melts into the lush, intoxicating, true texture of her, delectable, inviting, dangerous, accompanied by the pliant way she melds her body to mine, hands skittering up my back in alarmingly arousing sparks of desire. I pull her inside the den. She untucks the towel around my waist and flings it onto the couch.

"So, we are resuming the festivities?" she asks, nipping my neck.

"Patience."

With one hand under her head, the other around her waist, I bear her down to the couch; surprise darkens her eyes from tin to pewter, as if surrendering her uncertainty alloys it with trust. Only when she's fully settled do I lower my body onto hers, my skin burning at every place we touch. Those eyes, almost too otherworldly to behold, shine with an adoration I don't deserve, softening the angles of her face. 

When our lips meet again, there's an uncanny sensation of falling backwards off a precipice, even though I'm facing downward. Her fingers in my hair, fingers stroking my jawline, keep me drinking in the heady sensation of falling, spiraling together into zero gravity.

She makes a little involuntary squeak when I touch the back of her neck and thumb her earlobe. Trailing my hand lower, I brush the delicate lines of her throat, the curve of her shoulder, the roundness of her breast. The slow exhalation of hot breath against my neck makes me linger on the peak, luxuriate in the way her skin shivers from the heat we're generating.

Before her gasps become loud groans, I move my hand lower to the dip of her waist, that curvy territory formerly revealed in tantalizing slices between the edges of non-regulation clothing. My hand travels to her navel — the sudden snap of her hips against mine indicating yet another erogenous zone — and then lower, lower still, until I can tell that "ready" seems to be her constant state.

When I enter her, it feels like cheating; it's the way I'd most often entered my wife, but it's cheating Vala, because she doesn't know that slow, gentle, deep strokes are my way of seeing if she'll respond the same. When I pause in mid-thrust, she seeks my mouth and makes an unhurried circuit of it with her tongue. I draw back from the kiss, use both hands to hold her face still, compel her to look into my eyes. She parts her mouth to speak, but only breathes a sigh as my resumed motion anchors her. In the deepest swing of my next thrust — here, precisely, now — we finally see and fathom the connection behind our eyes, the impact of knowing without proof or preamble that the years of stupid crap that led up to this moment also obscured a truth I hadn't the courage to see.

A simple joy transfigures the tension in her face; she flushes rosily — face, neck, shoulders, breasts; hair spread in a midnight halo frames the living portrait. Her ankles crossed behind my back open her to longer, deeper thrusts, and I lift her, as before, by the waist to hold her against me in quartered tempo to our fluttering heartbeats, her eyes still riveted to mine as she rides the warm glory of each stroke.

Then she's biting her lip like she needs just one more thing for the big finish, her eyes pleading me to use my hand to push a button. My lovely, dearest Vala, hold onto your kinky ass.

I dig my fist into her bruise; her face and body stiffen into a rictus of agonized pleasure; she roars with her head tossed back — the swollen heat clamping me in rhythmic waves sends me surging into that violent balm with her. There's trembling and frantic thrashing as we're thrown into the implosion, our physical accord heightened by the miracle of coming together, spinning us upward until we hit the apex and slide down on sweating skin into a thrumming mutuality of panting and sharing each other's pulse everywhere we're in contact, which feels like the entire surface of our bodies. 

All our hands can do, though yearning to caress, is hold onto each other; all our mouths can do, though opening to speak, is inhale the triumph; all our minds can do, trying to rationalize, is float along the delicious effulgence and will it to never end. The lesser part of an hour passes before Vala shifts uncomfortably and we roll onto our sides, entangled and bound together, sustaining the most contact possible, huddling in warmth as cooling sweat dissipates the heat.

I think we drift awhile, or doze, or merely listen to the cosmos reassemble as normal function returns to us.

"Wanna stay here forever," she sighs, her speech slurred and languorous, her palm to my palm, comparing the span of our hands.

"Me too." I marvel at the strength of her fingers, despite their slenderness.

"Do you mean that, Daniel?"

Oh god, I can't believe this is happening. "Do you?"

She lifts her head from my hammering heart, looks straight at me, folds her hand into mine. "I once thought that any moment, any contact you could spare me, would be all I'd want forever." Fear and beauty dance in her eyes. "But if you aren't in all of my portion of forever, I'll stop believing in an ever-expanding universe."

"Vala..." Destiny in two syllables. "You, we... me too." I know more words than most everyone on this planet, but there's not a single one in any language that can convey what she means to me, not one word that can contain its fullness without profaning its purity, reducing it to euphemism, or shattering its inadequate shell.

"Your laughter is my music, Daniel."

But I can't hear it for my tears.


	8. Choke and Throttle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is Daniel ready to claim Vala outside the privacy of his home?

Have you ever had a feeling that made absolutely no logical sense, but it turned out to be right?

When I analyze the ways we're so completely opposite and wrong for each other, they could just as easily be the ways we're right. As we head for the mechanic's, I walk; Vala skips ahead of me. The open, wind-scrubbed Colorado sky presses the last warmth of an indolent summer against approaching autumn, preserving the bloom against the sere.

I catch up to her as she bends over an unidentifiable pile of road kill. "What creature was that?"

"I have no idea. Maybe a large squirrel or other rodent?"

"Poor beast. Didn't see the car coming, I guess." She tosses the snapped-off bud of a wildflower near where its head might've been. "So why do your people still use internal combustion engines for common transport? The technology's far too primitive for your stage of industrial development."

I shrug. "Good question. Could be because robber barons still control the fossil fuel market."

"And your vehicle technician is repairing an oil leak, yes?"

"Yes," I answer, and seize her by the waist, drawing her away from the carcass. "And I need to get my truck before he closes shop at noon."

She turns in my arms to face me. "You said before we left that he specializes in the repair of motorcycles. Why's he fixing your truck?"

"Jack had a motorcycle and a truck, which he gave me when he moved to DC, and recommended the guy who's kept his machines running after he divorced. His wife wasn't around to fix them anymore. It's just another half mile — almost a klick ahead."

"Race ya!" She slides out of my grasp and sprints away.

The pigtailed apparition in military boots, leather pants, and a tank top so tight it tells the temperature, flits away. But having become intimate with the apparition reveals the ruse — the huntress behind the decoy — and I'm as complicit in my capture as she is in the chase.

The race ends when she's suddenly drawn short by a heap of rusted engine parts outside the neighboring auto parts wholesaler. "Oh, Daniel, that's from a Wankel engine! Samantha and Cameron were arguing about the epitrophoid chamber last week." She paws through the detritus, plucking off dead leaves as she wrests out a mangled rotor.

"We're not adopting random scrap metal," I warn before heading into the mechanic's office.

No one's in the office, so I poke my head in the garage.

"Carlos? Hi, it's me, Daniel Jackson."

"Hey Daniel!" I hear the voice, but don't see the man. "Almost done with this muffler. Last job of the day. Be with you in a few."

"No problem. Don't rush on my account." Inside the office, I sit in the lone customer chair and pick up a 1990 Ducati owner's manual from the magazine table. The door opens; it's not Vala, but an overweight, middle-aged man in ridiculously branded biker leather. A butterfly bandage spans the bridge of his nose.

"What're you starin' at, Four Eyes?" he asks, glaring down at me, a swollen and discolored eye socket subverting his menace.

I shake my head and look back down at the much more interesting diagram of a choke and throttle.

"Yo, Gomez!" he bellows into the garage. "_Que pasa, ese_?"

"His name's Carlos," I mutter, knowing that if the man heard me, he wouldn't care. "He's Portuguese, not Mexican."

"Be right with you!"

"_Andale, andale_! It's an emergency! Some idiot cocktease busted the cruise control on my chopper last night."

I have a bad feeling about this. Vala chooses that moment to enter, purposefully walks over to the man and taps him on the back. He turns around.

"I believe this is yours." She holds up the GPS locator she'd used the night before.

"Well hello, lady love," he coos in instant recognition, and grabs her wrist. "Didja hunt me down to transact some unfinished business?"

"Not particularly, given that your business model is based on third-rate beer and bluster," Vala replies, smilingly ignoring the way he twists her wrist to pull her closer. She lets the device fall from her captured hand.

"Looks like the mechanic's booked today." I'd quietly stepped behind the man before clapping a heavy hand in the crook of his shoulder, avoiding an absurdly fringed epaulet. "Guess you'll be getting your chopper fixed elsewhere." I punctuate the suggestion with an audible, bruising punch to his lower back. "Don't forget your toy." I kick the locator toward the door and push him after it.

The man grunts and spins around, prepared to confront a four-eyed bookworm, then reconsiders as he assesses me and Vala's boxing stance as she focuses on re-injuring his nose.

"Look me up when you need your mortgage refinanced." He nods courteously, picks up the gadget and lurches out the door.

"Darth Poseur," mutters the mechanic, who'd emerged from the garage. "He pisses off my paying clients and owes me for the last two jobs I did."

Vala holds up a fat wallet decorated with an Iron Cross. "I suspect he can well afford to settle the tab." She unsnaps it, revealing a scandalous wad of cash in denominations of one-hundred. Carlos counts out an amount and nods, leaving among the few extra Benjamins a suspicious, powder-coated twenty.

Through the open door, I watch the man ride away on his noise machine. "What's left is obviously worth more than his wedding ring."

"He’s rather unsophisticated for being a 'retired Berringer Consolidated multinational account executive' don’t you think?" Vala remarks, reading through the wallet's contents.

Oh shit. Berringer Consolidated is connected to the Trust. "Eh... let's just wipe off your prints and let Carlos mail this back to him," I advise her. "How much I owe ya, Carlos?"

"Not one dime if the Kaiser of Fucktardia never returns to my shop."

I haggle over paying my bill even after he tosses me the key.

Ninety-six dollars later, I lead Vala to the pickup parked in the side lot. "So he followed you into the alley after you left the bar?"

"Yep. Offered to pay for oral favors. Attacked when I refused. Matters got a bit, uh... unmanageable when two more randy drunkards showed up."

"Glad you didn't tell me earlier. I'd've killed him — a lot."

"I'd've beaten him — a lot — had I not slipped and fallen on someone's vomit."

"It scares me that you're so used to such bad company."

"The universe is a rough place, Daniel, but I'm glad you've got my six."

I reach around and press her six until there's no space between us. "Got your twelve o'clock now, too." Twelve hours ago, I would've been ashamed to display affection in public, but a small parking lot in an old industrial park is hardly the worst place to kiss her and cop a feel.

When we come up for air, Vala blinks dizzily. 

"Mmm... delicious. I'm hungry."

"You in the mood for Greek?"

"Right here against the truck?"

"I meant the cuisine."

"Oh." She seems genuinely disappointed. Then, "Oh! I'll drive us there!"


	9. Dining on the Spoils

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They've known each other for years, but how slow is too fast?

"Well, according to what Mitchell told me when he gave you driving lessons, that's not such a good idea."

"He says I drive as well as he does — maybe better."

I doubt he phrased it that way. "It's not so much your skill in operating a vehicle that's at issue, but your observance of traffic laws."

"All right then, you're driving me somewhere there's food that's not over-packaged, over-processed, reheated, reconstituted, unnaturally dyed, or artificially preserved."

We go to an organic market instead of a Greek cafe, where she samples nearly half the fresh produce she's gathered before we reach the register. 

"You really oughtta rinse off that carrot..."

"Why? Can't possibly be worse than the quasi-food items in the base commissary."

"Um, bacteria? And most people peel—"

"Ridiculous! That's the best part!"

I have to look away from the way she's licking the carrot or I'll bend her over the nearest produce bin and— oh look: locally prepared hummus, pita bread, tabbouleh, baba ghanouj...

"So, where are we dining on the spoils?" she asks when we're back on the road, sucking tahini off her fingers.

"There's a good al fresco location ten minutes away, if you can wait that long."

"Ah! Making camp." She never seems to mind eating outdoors when we go off-world. 

Actually, she never seems to mind eating. "If there’s any food left."

When we drive onto a gravel road in a semi-wooded area, Vala unbuckles the seat belt and leans halfway out the window. I hook my fingers into her waistband and pull her back in.

"Road's rough — don't want you to fall out."

"But there's an applauding tree over there." She's pointing ahead to a mass of shimmering leaves trembling atop a tall, pale trunk among various evergreens.

"That's a quaking aspen." Its common name doesn't dispel her fascination. All other foliage stands still, but for the one shivering in a high breeze only it can feel. 

At the end of the road, a modest chalet and two small outbuildings occupy a large, sunny clearing. The wool blanket I store behind the front seat now serves as adequate cover to bare dirt and low scrub.

"Are you trespassing for leisure, Daniel?" she asks, smirking and popping a cherry tomato in her mouth.

"Not _per se_..." I let her feed me a dolma dripping with olive oil. "It's a foreclosed property."

Lunch without forks or spoons eventuates from hand-fed bites of assorted fruits, vegetables, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean staples, to a feast of her fingers, lips, and tongue. Despite the blanket, pebbles and uneven ground make an uncomfortable surface for my back, bearing the weight of her on top of me. Before we get naked and sweaty, I sit up. "We left dessert in the truck—"

"Oh no we didn't," she murmurs into my neck.

"Yes, we did. Trust me."

She sits back and pouts; I use the opportunity to scoop her upright and drag her squealing to the truck, where I yank open the passenger door and hoist her onto the seat.

I grab one of the extra bottled waters from the sack on the floorboard where we’d left the baklava, and take a long pull, swishing the water in my mouth. "Perfect height for dessert," I say, kissing the "oh" of realization from her lips.

She wastes little time in unzipping her skin-tight leather pants while my mouth travels across her belly, tasting smooth skin and firm flesh, but before I tongue her navel, she becomes stiff and unresponsive.

“Something wrong?” I look up to see her head turned toward the driveway.

“Predictably wrong, as we seem to have established a pattern for being interrupted.”

The sound of a car engine and the crunch of gravel reach my ears, so I pull up her zipper. Fucking shit. I hate this planet.

An older couple emerge from a luxury sedan and approach. We engage in greetings and introductions: Frank and Shirley Henderson, accountant and legal secretary; Daniel Jackson, archaeologist; Vala Mal Doran—

“Mergers and acquisitions,” she volunteers before I can provide a pretext.

“So, are you two looking to buy this place?” asks the wife, looking askance at Vala’s leather and the mess she made of my hair.

“Yes, actually,” I confess, pulling Vala to my side as I had when we inhabited Harrid and Sallis. “I contacted the realtor several weeks ago, but it wasn’t until today the decision became clear.”

“Care to join our picnic?” Vala smiles in invitation, with a sidelong glance at me.

“Wouldn’t dream of horning in on you two lovebirds.” The husband winks at me in approval. “Just stopped by the old place to say goodbye. We’re moving down to Phoenix tomorrow morning.”

“This was your home?” 

“Until four years ago, when we sold it and moved up to Broadmoor,” sniffs the wife. “Too bad about the last buyer. Lost it in one of those stupid adjustable rate mortgages.”

“The shed’s still here, but he let the lawn go all to hell.”  The man shakes his head in reproach.

“No grass to mow.” I shrug. “Anyway, I’m used to dirt in my line of work.” 

They laugh politely.

“Our sons loved it here. They wouldn’t get off the shed.” The man glances at the outbuilding with a low-pitched roof. “I had to threaten them: I’ll get a rabid pit bull to rip out your intestines so your mother can use them to knit an ugly hat if you don’t get off the damn shed.” He then turns to Vala. “Got kids or plan on having any?”

“Oh, lots and lots,” she purrs. “At least a dozen. We just started to practice mak—”

“Vala,” I interject, finding a serendipitous distraction. “The wildlife’s making off with the leftovers.” 

We shoo away several birds and enterprising ants before tossing the food back into canvas shopping bags.

“Mind taking our picture in front of the gazebo?” asks the woman, holding out her handheld device. “The last owner seems to have done away with the fountain.”

When I try bypassing the intrusive anti-shake feature, the man assists me with less technical expertise than I have. “You oughtta get yourself one of these.” His voice drops to a whisper: “So you can make your own amateur porn.”

After posing stiffly in their designer golf wear, they advise us to pave over the gravel before it snows, and to make sure our kids keep off the damn shed. As they drive away, Vala calls out, “See you at prostration.”

“Vala.”

“Well, well, well. It’s not trespassing if it’s your house, is it?” She brandishes two bent slivers of adopted scrap metal, bounds up the verandah steps, and goes straight to the front door before I can stop her, my hands fumbling with folding the blanket.

“C’mon, haven’t you misbehaved enough for one weekend?”

She remains focused on picking the doorknob while replying, "Last night I ran away from a person I don’t recognize: boring Vala, appropriate Vala, Vala who realizes Tomin deserves better. That you, Daniel, I'd never deser—"

"Vala, no." I put my hand on her shoulder. “No matter how inappropriate or sneaky you behave, or how self-absorbed and defensive I can become, it’s not about deserving some reward.”

“You know, Daniel,” she starts on the deadbolt, “Jacek was always looking for the Big Score, the Last Job, the Final Caper that would enable him to give up playing confidence games and live… live the rest of his life comfortably, honestly.”

“I’m not your Big Score, Vala.”

“Of course not, darling.” Her eyes move from the lock and fix on me. “You’re…”

I read the meaning in her glance, and her words become mine. “You’re the rest of my life.” 

Her face lights up with a radiant smile; she pushes open the front door. “After you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Hendersons are characters from a Will Ferrell skit on Saturday Night Live.


	10. 100% Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home sweet home.

I pull her inside the house and kiss her forehead, her eyes, her nose, her chin, her neck, until she whimpers in impatience and kisses my mouth. The infectious, untamed desire to behave inappropriately on private property guides my hands down her back to her backside, which I grasp to pull her as close as possible. We stumble over the blanket I'd dropped in the blind two-step to find a wall to lean on.

"We're gonna get interrupted again unless you call the realtor," Vala whispers against my lips, and then I hear touch-tone dialing. She's looking intently over my shoulder, and the beeps dominate my left ear.

"What are you—?"

She holds my cell phone to my face, and I hear ringing. "Tell the agent to cancel all showing appointments to this address because you're buying it. My bank in Singapore can transfer the full cash amount as soon as their Monday begins. Let's not bother with that mortgage-escrow-nonsense."

"Whoa-ho… wait a minute." I reach up to cancel the call, but the agent picks up. I tell him my name and the address of the property; he puts me on hold, to vapid music. "Vala, how can you afford to pay cash for a four-bedroom house on one-point-six acres?"

"I bought 10,000 shares of AIG when it was penny stock, watched it rise to $1.14." She insinuates her fingers into the waist of my pants and tugs up my t-shirt. "Sold short when it reverse-split 1:20." Her palms contact the bare skin of my sides. "Bought back in when it floored around $11, and just sold for $45 per share. I'm not poor, Daniel." Her hands brush light, feathery strokes on my abs.

"And you learned to play the market by reading fashion magazines?" I pull off the band binding one of her pigtails.

"Stock market, black market, what's the difference?" The fingers of each of her hands tap a symmetric pattern on my ribcage. "It's just a matter of securing reliable intel."

"Where exactly did you get the intel?" I let the wavy strands of her hair weave through the fingers of one hand while undoing the remaining pigtail with the other.

"After my abduction incident," she palms my pectorals, grazing my nipples, "the mission reports and dossiers related to the Trust were useful not only for jogging my memory, but for—" 

"Dr. Jackson?" The easy-listening instrumental ends and the realtor clicks in. "Did you wish to view the property again?"

"Um, no, I've decided to buy it. Please start the paperwork." She pulls my shirt higher to trail kisses down my stomach, and I concentrate on not stammering. "100% down, cash. Is Monday good for you?"

Monday is more than okay for him; we set a time before hanging up. 

Vala, strangely distracted from my body, is scanning a realty flyer she must've found on the floor. "This house has a wine cellar?"

"I was so sure you'd find the thermal windows more interesting."

"And what 'tufted wool carpet'?" She looks at the hardwood flooring.

"Upstairs, master bedroom."

She dashes up the stairs while I'm trying to fit the phone into a pocket that's inconveniently next to the raging erection she's given me.

"Bring the blanket," she calls down as I shut the front door.

_Nag, nag, nag._

"I heard that."

"We're just looking around for a few minutes, then leaving," I call up the stairs, before following. We're not going to have inappropriate sex on someone else's property. It wouldn't be appropriate.

Her boots are off, and she's standing in the middle of the largest bedroom on the second story, peeling off her pants. "You were saying something about dessert, Daniel."

"The dining room's downstairs." I close the bedroom door behind me, and lock it.

"Glad to see you've brought the blanket," she laughs, then with a coy tilt of her head, says, "Please be gentle with me; it's my first time."

"Um, yeah." I try to maintain a straight face. "I promise." I pitch the blanket at her, which, despite her quick attempt to catch it, causes her lose her balance on the foot not stepping out of a pant leg, and topple to the floor.

"I'm naturally quite graceful, you know," she explains, gracelessly wrestling her foot from leather and a sock.

"Sure you are." I kneel and grab her face, plundering her mouth with my tongue. Her arms slide around me and pull me against her with a desperation built over the three hours since we last made love. I move my hands into the dark mass of her hair; as the cool, glossy locks glide between my fingers, she moans and runs her hands under my shirt to rub my back, creating a frisson that rockets up and down my spine.

"More skin. More… hot," she pants, trying to pull off my shirt.

"Okay." I pull off her top. Her nipples are already erect. "Don't you normally wear a bra?"

"Are you complaining?" She plasters herself against my chest after she helps me remove my shirt and glasses.

"Does complaining get you naked faster?" I lick a spot behind her earlobe, anticipating the gasp it causes.

She recovers, shuddering. "Not as fast as you not complaining."

I draw my tongue down the banquet of her body, feasting on the subtle changes in the flavor and fragrance of her skin, from the metal and butter of her neck and throat, to the cider and spice of her breasts and belly, to the exotic blend of a Samarkand curry found only in fable and the curls well below her navel. She's delightfully responsive to the slightest breath or touch of my tongue, and I haven't yet sampled the real dessert. Pausing to inhale the perfume of that dark orchard, I reach for the blanket, still in some semblance of a folded roll, and slide it under her rump to cant her hips upward.

"That's a better use for that blanket than what I had in mind," she says, threading her fingertips through my hair.

"What'd you have in mind?" I pull the panties off her legs.

"Oh, just protecting our lovely carpet."

"A lovely carpet it is," I say, nuzzling.

I part her thighs to plant a garden of kisses along the twin columns of her legs, the skin there as smooth as her voice, skin brushing lips, voice brushing ears, thighs clasping my head until I can't tell the fruit from the song, her voice blooming in a phonemic bouquet: the German umlaut over o, the vowel in the tonal dip that lifts the Thai feminine petition _ka_, and that weird French triphthong in _fauteuil_ that I could never pronounce.

My slow exhalation mingles with the heat of her flesh when I drag my tongue along the outside folds, the ineffable texture blending into scent and taste, brine slick as fallen tears shed on a bisque altar, delicate bisque flowing down my tongue, sliding deeper to blend with—

"Please, Daniel..."

"If you insist." I run my tongue along her inside folds. She arches her back and plants the sole of her foot between my shoulder blades to keep me from moving away. Like that's gonna happen.

Her moans indicate that what I'm doing is either bang-on or too slow — maybe both. I slip a finger inside her; she reacts instantly with a cry and a hand fisting the blanket. I lick higher, closer to the underside of the nub, the tip of my tongue on the meatus, working my hand around as the fluids of her arousal spread onto all my fingers. With my smallest finger, I massage the puckered opening of her ass.

She groans and twists her hips, trying to position her clit where my tongue is.

I slowly, gently insert the cream-slick finger into her anus.

"Daniel." My name in a ragged rasp escapes her lips. "You bastard. You glorious bastard."

I move my hand back and forth, one finger in each hole, her natural wetness more than sufficient to maintain the frictionless motion, aided by my tongue dancing around her clit, without contacting it. Yet.

Her breathing hitches into irregular gasps; she nearly crushes my head with her thighs. I flick the blade of my tongue on her clit, and she groans, shudders, stiffens, releases a warm rush of fluid down my chin, down my hand.

It's more than I can bear; I wrench my belt buckle open with the other hand, unbutton, unzip, push down the clothing that's in the way, and pull out an erection hard enough to break a granite cartouche. As Vala's climax throbs against my face, I moan and stroke myself.

"Do it, darling," she groans. "Put it in."

I lift my reluctant face away from the moist, honeyed feast, and sink myself into her. The tight, luscious heat creates that familiar, beautiful agony of ecstasy: the conflicting desire to stay in one place to relish the receptacle versus the urgency to thrust and build the pleasure to an unbearable point.

"So… good… so…" she stammers between each push, "now the other place."

Hello, she wasn't kidding about Greek. "You sure?"

"Shut up. Do it."

My cock is covered with more slickness than two people could possibly exhaust; I slowly withdraw and press the head against her ass. "Ready?"

She nods, bears down, and I enter, slowly, caref—yes, oh gods yes, oh hell yes. If the vagina is a warm, wet fist, or the mouth a slick hot ring with a moving tongue, then the anus is an impossibly tight ring that wrings my shaft with singular purpose.

"Let me drive," she breathes, and I nod. Her eyes are still hazy as she slides herself up and down and rides the spasms of some prolonged, mind-bending orgasm that only goddesses experience. My heart skips at her beauty: the tumble of dark, wanton hair framing a finely sculpted face, the large, wide-set, mist-colored eyes full of variable light, the expanse of smooth, ivory skin over the lean, svelte body of a mythical nymph. 

Mine, all mine: a primal, carnal wish that defies higher thought processes, years of academic re-conditioning, ascetic denial. I can't hold off for long; this is my first time penetrating a woman this way. Jack's beauty gives me the strength to endure without him; Vala's, the knowledge that I can't live without her. Cognates: the same, but different.

Slow thrusts into her are barely enough to keep me poised on the edge. I search for indeclinable Sanskrit and Ancient adverbs in the intersection of our bodies, where language is spoken in skin and sweat and need. _Iti, ita_: thus. _Iha, hic_: here. _Idanim, autem_: now. Suddenly the granite cracks; I fragment into wordless, sharp shards graven in a transitory monument, planting runes, scattering light and dust into a dark, deep underground. 

I'm not sure who's yelling, she or I, but if anyone's within a mile radius, they'll know that Daniel Jackson has done Vala Mal Doran six ways 'til Sunday, and doesn't do it silently.

Maybe I passed out, but the next thing I'm aware of is kisses on my face, giggling in my ears, long, black hair above me, my back on the floor.

"Tomin never…" she sighs.

"Sha're wouldn't." Oh, crap. I don't kiss and tell.

"My enhanced interrogation techniques are finally working." She's kissing and tasting herself on my face.

"You're the one who confesses to holding an offshore bank account after being bought off with a cheap meal." Well, not so cheap—it cost almost fifty bucks in groceries. "Tell me your IDC."

"It's the same as yours, silly. But they change it every week." She leans back, then plops a large book on my chest.

"What's that?"

"Someone left an old phone directory in the room." She places my glasses on my face. "Let's see, we need to shop for a new bed that you can't break…"

"Oh god, I am so doomed." From this angle, I can see outside the window that it isn't just one quaking aspen applauding, but two. My chest starts to shake.

"What are you laughing at?"

"Reminds me of a charming hymn in the _Rig Veda_ about Lopamudra seducing her celibate husband Agastya—"

"Yes, Daniel, I saw the notes you scribbled in that Devanagari book I sat on last night." Vala keeps the phonebook on my chest before lying on top of me, then scoots herself up until we're nose to nose. "You do enjoy pornography, but it's the kind that doesn't have pictures."

**Author's Note:**

> I don't so much stand on the shoulders of giants as I grovel in their shadows:
> 
> Stow Away  
> http://lmichelle599.livejournal.com/221693.html  
> by Lisa Michelle lmichelle599  
> "Bookends" was inspired by Lisa Michelle's treasure trove of trope; my favorite aspect of "Stow Away" is how a man with an advanced degree in philology was so distracted, he couldn't finish a crossword puzzle over the weekend. Plus: chicken!
> 
> eurydice, after  
> http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/63610.html  
> by synecdochic  
> synecdochic's virtuosic execution of technobabble as a tactic to delay ejaculation stands as the first (and best) use of linguistics jargon in 'Gate fanfic. This angsty, porny tour-de-force unequivocally captures character while describing a rather startling sexual practice.


End file.
